We are back online! The reason why we haven’t uploaded any new posts in the past week is because we have been robbed and lost most of our electronic devices.

Needless to say, events like these are very disheartening and it is no surprise why we keep them on our list of things best to be avoided. At the same time when we look back at our tribe’s short history (or life in general) it becomes clear that difficult situations are at least as much a part of our lives as pleasant situations.

So beyond taking reasonable precautions it is more important how we deal with difficulties as a group rather than wishing they would never happen. And often it is difficult times that provide opportunities for growth as they have for us in the past. In other words, being emotionally prepared to learn what we can from difficult situations and otherwise let go & move on. Much like we have done by leaving Capijuma / Dark Stone Bromelias.

We certainly can’t change the past and the future to come, we build in the only time we have, the present moment.

Having our personal space & privacy violated brought about some fears and a more paranoid and suspicious frame of mind. Soon after the initial shock we shifted into a very practical mindset.

Losing work (documents), memories (photos), or the pleasures of having a lifetime collection of music can easily make anyone wish it never happened. Always backup!*

Most of us learn this the hard way and many of us who already keep regular backups do so because of some event of file loss. For me it happened after two hard drive failures many years ago. Ofcourse, now I keep regular backups and thanks to this I have lost at most 3 days worth of pictures. Unfortunately Monica, Richard, and our very good friend Ígor didn’t have a backup system in place and lost many files.

Another challenge is to be able to replace the actual physical things that have been stolen. Ofcourse if you have extra money this can be resolved quickly. If not, it can take a lot of effort and time to replace what was lost, especially for us here in Brazil with the extremely high prices of electronic devices.

In my case, I’m very grateful to my mom, dad, and my brother who are helping me replace what has been lost and if it wouldn’t be for my brother I wouldn’t even have this smart phone on which I’m writing this post.

Looking back, these past few days we worked on accepting this unfortunate situation that stumped us at first, reflected on what we could have done better (but only as far as it can help us to identify reasonable precautions we might make), and moved on with our daily lives to keep our minds from being preoccupied with fear fueled ruminations.

We are very grateful to all of you who showed concern. Thank you for the caring calls and emails!

*In fact I do so to multiple locations, which I would highly recommend to everyone. To a local external hard drive kept in a separate location from the computer, encrypted copies remotely backed up to friends & family computers, and a cloud stored backup. My personal all time favorite tool to do all this and more is called Crashplan. I have been using this free backup tool for many years on over a dozen Windows, Mac, and Linux computers without any problems (the cloud backup is a paid service).